Intranets always partly reflect their organisations’ cultures, and they mirror the companies they serve through content, processes, and contributions from employees. Using imagery and branding to reflect company culture.

Someone recently asked how you would go about measuring culture change, and I thought it’s an interesting question. A learning culture is optimal for organizational innovation and agility, and it’s likely that not all elements are already in place. Say, for instance, one desirable outcome of a learning culture would be, well, learning! Of course, if you were expecting other outcomes from your culture initiative, you’d naturally want aligned methods.

How about some more of the quote - actually the preceding paragraph: Culture is no more likely a target than the air we breathe. Culture is an idea arising from experience. That is, our idea of culture of a place or organization is a result of what we experience there.

For companies undergoing rapid growth, balancing the impacts of new hires with existing collaborative and cultural models can be a challenge. The business has a strong culture and a flat structure. Collaboration. Indeed, growth has actually boosted collaboration.

One of the most powerful tools for moving an organization’s culture toward collaboration and knowledge sharing is a process called Action Learning. Design and implement a collaborative process for long-term strategic vision development and deployment. ?

This to me is a metaphor for the benefits of creating a culture in which learning can flourish. I’ve earlier detailed what the research says about the elements of a learning organization, and it’s clear that you need a culture with several elements.

I’m a big fan of Tim Stock ‘s work, which weaves together a deep network perspective with a rich view of how culture is changing informed by semiotic analysis. I earlier shared one of his presentations in a post on how the culture of luxury is changing. The slides to his presentation at SXSW today on Culture Networks and the codes that drive them are available below. Culture Networks (SXSW 2012). MORE >>

Tweet Everyone talks about collaboration in the workplace today but what does it really mean? This can be enabled by social media but note that social media also make the company culture transparent. A dysfunctional company culture does not improve with transparency, it just gets exposed. Blogs and Wikis are inherently more transparent than email, where 90% of collaboration occurs. Users are first gaining exposure to these tools as consumers, within consumer culture. MORE >>

Social Collaboration vs The Existing Communication Culture. Sometimes (and quite often according to my own observations) there is a significant gap between the existing organizational culture and the kind of culture that readily will embrace and adopt social software and social collaboration practices. Virtual collaboration does practically not exist and even if there is an inherent need for it, it is rarely articulated. The Content Economy. Pages. About. MORE >>

Collaboration is important to buisness, but it isn''t the only thing. Peter Vander Auwera has an interesting discussion on The Myth of Collaboration , which is an interview transcript. Collaboration is an important part of productivity. The focus of the interview focused on the idea of forcing collaboration to happen, rather than creating an environment in which it can happen. . The framing example was around redesigning office layouts with collaborative spaces. MORE >>

promoting collaboration. The fifth purpose, is to reflect, influence and help shape culture. Organisational culture is often expressed as ‘it’s the way we do things around here’, though this is a less than satisfying explanation. More helpful is to think of culture as being to an organisation as personality is to a person: essential, unique and difficult to define but surfaces at the point of interaction and shapes the experience of the relationship. MORE >>